February 28, 2015

With my new Leonvo desktop and the reduced workload on my Mac Mini I am pretty happy with my technology plan for 2015. Everything thing seems to be working well.

If you have read many of my posts here, you might know that one of my favorite computers of all time is a 2004, dual G5 running OS 10.5.8. It has 1.5GBs of ram and still runs after over ten years of heavy use.

I have mentioned a number of things about today's Apple that indicate a company much more interested in piling up cash than in delivering the computers that many of us once expected from Apple.

I dislike the incompatible versions of the iWork apps and the continual notices that my Mavericks powered MacMini is incompatible with iCloud. I have written about why I do not like Apple Mail and iPhoto programs. All of that has to do with the product that OSX has recently become.

OSX for several years after it was introduced was one of the easiest to sell operating systems that I have ever sold. It was a product that improved with every release and impressed almost everyone who took the time to try it.

One of my favorite sayings is that those who are ignorant of history often have no idea whether they are going forwards or backwards. Sometime new technology is better and sometimes it is not the answer.

In the spirit of that, I used to take the new college graduates who wanted to sell Macs at our Apple dealership in 1984 and make them spend a few days learning the Apple IIe before they got their hands on a Mac. A few memos written using AppleWriter made MacWrite seem even more special.

I share some examples about Apple's refusal to even consider its own history in my book about my Apple sales career, The Pomme Company. The Apple I know so well is a company whose stubborn refusal to pay attention to its own history has doomed it to repeat many mistakes. Perhaps taking its operating system for granted might be high on the list as I well remember the days of System 7.

I recently booted up my dual G5 to look for a handful of old pictures that I needed to write this family history for the folks who bought our family home and now run it as a bed & breakfast.

Finding the pictures was not much of a trouble (maybe "find" even works better on the old Macs), but the real treat was going back to the earlier version of OSX. OSX felt snappy and I once again got the feeling that I was in an environment where my experience as a computer user trying to get work done was important.

This trip back in computer time prompted me to run a few timed tests. I have heard people complain about how slow OSX Mavericks can be but I had not made the effort to time it. I was not very surprised about the results.

I did each one of the tests at least a couple of times and some had to be done more because I forgot to hit the start button on the timer.

I timed each computer to the point when it got to the log in window and then from the point I hit enter after typing my password to the point that I could launch a browser and it was ready for me to type in the URL.

Here are the results.

Dual 1.8Ghz G5 with two 1TB drives and 1.5GB of RAM took 46.5 seconds to the log in window and 15 seconds to Safari being ready for the URL.

MacMini running Mavericks with I5 processor 16GBs of RAM and two USB drives took 1 minute 25 seconds to log in and another 1 minute and 45 seconds before Safari was ready for the URL.

I5 iMac running Yosemite with 120 GB SSD and 8GBs of RAM and one firewire 800 drive took 31.7 seconds to log in window and 10 seconds for Safari to be ready for the URL

I7 Lenovo laptop 750GB drive and 8GBs of RAM running Windows 7 took 41 seconds to log in window and 24 seconds for Chrome to be ready for the URL.

I7 Lenovo Desktop with hybrid 2TB drive and 16GBs of RAM running Windows 8.1 took 18 seconds to log in window and 14 seconds for Chrome to be ready for the URL.

I5 Lenovo Yoga Laptop with 64GB SSD and 4GBs of RAM with two 1TB USB drives running Windows 8.1 took 8.5 seconds to log in window and 13.9 seconds for Chrome to be ready for the URL.

I used Safari for the Macs because it is the only browser that works reasonably well on the dual G5. I did not think it was fair to saddle the Windows machines with Safari.

It is a little sad that the iMac with a SSD is only a few seconds faster that a ten year old computer running regular hard drives.

All of this confirms what I can say with confidence as someone who uses Mac OS , Linux and Windows on a daily basis. You can get more done on one of today's Window's machines than you can with one of today's Macs.

It was nice to go back to the G5 where the operating system easily remembered the last file folder that I accessed. I also appreciated the reappearance of the escape key as a way to navigate back from a picture to the library in iPhoto.

I might still be a gungho Mac user if Apple had seriously worked to improve OSX instead of turning it into a poor nephew of iOS. If Apple were cash strapped, I might understand the need to focus its efforts on only where the money is but Apple has all the money it needs to do whatever it wants. Unfortunately a truly better OSX is not it.

I did not get to run a Linux test since I have yet to have time to bring up my next dedicated Linux box, but I will find time eventually. I think Linux still might be my future OS, but I doubt it will be via the VMware product I am using now when I run Xubuntu. Also I have not written off Windows 10 either. Microsoft probably has more to lose if they do not perform on the desktop than Apple does.

Working to bring fiber to those towns missed by Google is going well and keeping me too busy to play as much as I would like with my Linux project. Also I could have easily run a test with my wife's Chromebook but it would have smoked all the competition and I did not want her to know that she has the fastest computer to the races in the house.

January 26, 2015

There was a time when Apple was my family's world. It went far beyond technology since the company wrote our paycheck. Before Steve came back, Apple was much like a family. I can remember going to a memorial service with our vice president of higher education when the son of my regional manager was killed in a car crash. I can also remember the same vice president showing up at my father in law's funeral.

Our vacations were sometimes even Apple sponsored. If you were good in sales at Apple, you could win a golden Apple sales incentive Apple trip. We took trips like that to Paris, London, Vienna, Ireland, Australia, Munich, and Canada. I once even loaded my family in our Previa van and drove across the country from Virginia so I could attend a higher education conference in Monterey, California. A key customer was going, my manager said Apple could not afford to fly me out so I turned it into a family vacation.

I usally wrote with a Cross pen that had an Apple logo on it. I had a number of Apple watches and of course as any Apple employee will tell you, I had an imposing stack of Apple t-shirts. It would have unusual to come home from an Apple event without five to ten t-shirts. When I wore a suit, it had a gold Apple lapel pen with diamonds in it. It was an Apple life that went well beyond the technology.

Of course the technology was also there. There were Apple modems then Apple Airports and Quicktake digital cameras and even Apple scanners. Of course there were faithful Apple LaserWriters and color Imagewriters. Our home networking started with AppleTalk connectors. We even had an Apple CD player and I once carried the Sony-Erircsson T68i cell phone which Steve Jobs demoed on stage in 2002.

Most impressive of all, I had an Apple Color LaserWriter. As a manager working out of my own house the Color LaserWriter shipped to me not long after it was first introduced. The 110 pound printer was shipped to my house and that same week one caught fire at Penn State which was one of my team's accounts. It was the beginning of the end of the Color LaserWriter. None of the reps wanted to deal with it after the fire so it never left my house until it became surplus. For years it was very popular with neighborhood children who needed color graphs for their science projects.

The Apple technology in house spread to several neighbors. There were programs for Apple employees to let neighbors and family buy computers at a substantial discount. We had many neighbors take advantage of it.

Some of those computers in the days of the Performas and endless model confusion before Steve came back were not that great. I can remember replacing a few. A few of the ones that that had Intel processors on a card were especially flaky. Fortunately laptops were so expensive in those days that I had no close friend buy one of the infamous Apple 5300 laptops.

When Steve came back, pieces of the Apple life and products started disappearing. The Newton which had become a favorite of mine while I was traveling got canned along with printers and everything but a few computers. The new focus was good because some very good computers came out of it, and I bought several of them for the family. I did that even after purchases for the family from Apple became less and less of a good deal with Steve choosing to also make money off of employees. I believe I bought seven or eight iMacs for the family over the years. There still is probably a lamp shade iMac in one of our children's storage areas.

Most people know that Steve was focused on technology but few understand how focused he was on making money. I believe the culture of making lots of money pretty well defines everything Apple does these days.

For me Apple has itself whittled away much of their technology that I counted on at one time. I long ago retired my Airports and went to better, less expensive wireless equipment from other manufacturers. Even before I left Apple, I ended up switching to HP laser printers. Where once printers worked seamlessly on Macs, now it sometimes not the case. From the day I got it over eight years ago my HP Photosmart 6180 has been a challenge on my Macs. The last two OSX upgrades I installed it would work for a week and quit. I recently installed it on my new I7 Lenovo desktop. So far it is working flawlessly which it has done on a number of Windows computers over the years.

However, my LaserJet CP1025nw color printer has worked well on my Macs from the start. I have also had good luck with a number of Epson printers from their Professional 4000 servies on down and with a Canon Pixma printer. Printing is one of those things you never know until you try it. It once was not that way with Apple. An Apple printer would just work because Apple made certain that it did. I like to think printers mostly disappeared because Steve did not like the mess of paper. I think it was 2004 when we got an edict from Steve that we could no longer hand out paper brochures or information in our booths because it made the booths look messy.

Of course there are some programs that needed to die and iWeb was one of them. Apple has also made changes that made my love of its products a short term affair. Other times they have made me sound almost prophetic. I published this in 2007.

I haven't spent much time with the new iPhoto but my initial impression is that it is much easier to do web albums, but the export panel isn't as efficient or perhaps as quick to use.

I do really like the options that people viewing the albums are given. Apple has done a really nice job there.

I think web albums part of iLife is much better than the iWeb way of publishing photos. It's almost as good as the original iPhoto way of doing it. :) Of course I now have published photos in all three versions. I'm not sure how I manage the older ones.

I have one philosophical problem with the way Apple manages the web albums. If you make a mistake like I did and only publish one picture, the only way to get it off the web is to delete it in the web gallery section of iPhoto on my Mac.

It would make a whole lot more sense if you could manage it from the web instead of using an application on your computer.

If you try the links, the only one that does not work after seven and one half years is the one to the .Mac web gallery. Given that who would you trust with your photos? Certainly not Apple. At one time we were surrounded by an Apple life and now we are not. As much as there might be some readers out there ready to comment (and do not waste your time, it will not be published) that I have a grudge against Apple because they showed me the door (which by the way is how almost everyone in Apple sales that I know left), that really is not the case. My Apple career rests on always stellar performance reviews and a wall full of sales awards. Read my book if you want more.

Most tellingly I have spent something over $7,000 just on Apple hardware products since I left the company in 2004. I bought an Aluminum Powerbook G4 within days of leaving. A few months later I bought my dual G5 and Apple monitor which I still have and cherish. I bought a MacBook which I loved in spite of some early faults (and a dead memory slot) and an iMac which has required a lot of love. I now depend on a MacMini which had a tough early life and has no more ports left to give.

That is basically $700 per year on Apple hardware over ten years for five computers. That does not include external hard drives both Firewire and USB, keyboards, mice, cables, and adapters. The G5 is still running but unsupported by Apple. The MacBook is dead. The Powerbook G4 is dead but could be fixed but it would require more money than it is worth. The iMac is retired because I just do not want to spend any more money on upgrading its storage and I am irritated by yet another incompatible version of Pages. Taking the iMac apart is not something I want to do again even if that did increase its storage.

I have spent close to that many dollars on Windows computers in the same ten years. The only one of those nine computers that is dead is a Dell laptop that I bought in 2004. I gave it away and someone sat on it in 2011. So when I said there would be no Apple under the tree, there were plenty of reasons behind that decision.

I look at what could be classed as my Apple addiction in the same light that I do the $2,220 that I spend annually with Time-Warner. It is an expense that I need to manage better. With Netflix, Prime Video, and some of the other options popping up this year, I hope to halve that Time-Warner expense and get the Apple expense down to under $100 per year.

Maybe life would be different if I had not bought an original Droid five years ago. There has never been an iPhone in my life. I recently upgraded to a Droid Turbo and love it for all the same reasons that I loved the first one, ruggedness, great mapping capability and very good phone reception. I am also tremendously impressed with the turbo charging. I only plug the phone in for charging while I am having breakfast in the morning. Of course I have to chuckle at the email I exchanged with an Apple employee recently over an almost unintelligible OSX message.

"...too much focus on iOS and yet my phone still keeps crashing and has a defective battery they will not replace."

With no iPhone (because they had very poor reception initially in our coastal area ), it was easy not to fall under the spell of the iPad especially since my children gave me an original Kindle Fire at Christmas in 2011.

We have come a long way since Apple was at the center of our world. Now on the edge of Apple's world, I am more disappointed in Apple products than anything. I have not given up on Apple products but I am in more of a holding pattern waiting for a product to convince me that there is still genius at Apple that will produce a product worthy of my money.

I will continue to look for software to make my MacMini useful. No software that has caught my attention recently like Coda 2 seems to come from Apple. Pixelmator will stay as my choice for a couple of very specific tasks for awhile. We will see if Pixelmator can survive my new found access to the latest and greatest Photoshop. I also have one website that requires RapidWeaver unless or until I change it. It is not a good sign that I have not upgraded to the most recent version Rapidweaver.

Most of the software I need comes with the Mac, and the rest is reasonably priced.

The next is the list of programs that I believed five years ago to be keeping me on a Mac.

"RapidWeaver, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Fetch are the programs that keep me using a Mac. I also use Pages for one tri-fold brochure that I publish monthly. I am pretty sure that I could do it in Word, but I have never taken the time to try it. I could live without Pages."

It is funny how things have changed in five years. My Windows computers are the ones I count on now. They boot faster than my Mac and have done so for a long time. The famed Apple user interface consistency is not what it used to be. I would far rather use Techsmith's SnagIt on Windows than on a Mac. The user interface is better. The user interface is also better on Windows Mail 8.1. The iMovie user interface changes with every release and it seems that I have relearn it every time that I open it. We will not even get into the changes on Pages. The incompatible file formats are enough of a headache as Bregalad recently commented. When I am managing a lot of files or devices, I would far rather be using Windows 8.1 than a Mac.

I migrated my tri-fold brochure to Word long ago because the office printer I was using stopped supporting Macs after an upgrade. A few years after that I switched to a two-sided rack card that I now get Staples to print. I did have trouble printing the PDF proof of it last year from Pixelmator on a Mac and switched to Photoshop on Windows. I abandoned iPhoto and now Apple has it on the same chopping block that got iDVD. My sneaking suspicion is that things do not work as well on a Mac as they used to but other than anecdotal information, I have no real proof other than having to regularly reboot a couple of applications on my Mac. That never used to be a problem.

In the end many of those things that made me commit time and money to the Mac have disappeared. I bought my wife a Chromebook for Christmas. Her five year old HP laptop is still working but the battery life is not what she needs in spite of a new battery last winter. She loves her new Chromebook and I actually like it better than either of my tablets. I am amazed by the Chromebook's battery life, good screen, speed, and light weight. However, there is still an Apple IIe in a storage closet to keep the memories alive.

If computers are going to become disposable like Apple seems to hope, they need to be very inexpensive and I am not holding my breath for Apple to catch that wave. That is it from the Crystal Coast where we are on snowflake patrol while others are waiting for a potentially historic blizzard.

January 15, 2015

Starting in the summer of 1982, Apple came into my life. With an Apple II+, an Epson MX-80 printer, and AppleWriter II, I was off to the races. Apple, the company, went on to consume a big chunk of my life. I dedicated over twenty years of my life to convincing people that using an Apple computer was the best way to have a productive relationship with technology and the data generated by it.

Even after my career at Apple ended in the summer of 2004, I continued to use Macs. Sometimes I was the only person using an Apple product at a meeting or even where I worked. As I have written, I think I managed to thrive while using Macs. I always felt that using a Mac kept the computer out of my way and let me get more things done.

For the last eleven years, I have been living in a multi-platform world. Sometimes it was because I wanted to and other times it was because I had to use something other than a Mac. Almost every day during those eleven years, I have spent time on a Windows computer and on a Mac. In addition on a majority of those days, I have also used a Linux computer.

I have come full circle and the company where I have worked for the last few years does most of its work on Macs. Apple was truly at the center of my digital life for many years. I used .Mac, iPhoto, iDVD, and even briefly tolerated iWeb. While never a real fan of iWorks or Apple's attempts at the cloud, I have been using both for years.

In a certain respect working for a Mac-centric company at this point in my life is unfortunate because I am as unhappy with Apple products as I can ever remember. The Apple platform now seems to get in my way so I am downsizing Apple's footprint in my life.

Having said that, this is in no way a rant again Apple or its products. It is more a list of what has pushed me to my decision and my first steps. I still have two Macs, but my reading of the tea leaves tells me that I am no longer one of the users that Apple targets. I do not have an iPhone or an iPad and my only iPod is an original one that I won from Apple for being manager of the year.

I am convinced that the best way to have a healthy relationship with technology is to keep Apple and its products on the edge of my digital life. I make heavy demands on my technology. Apple does not seem to be interested in power users on a budget.

On a more fundamental level, I am little upset that Apple shows little consistency in the treatment of my data. Perhaps the screen capture at the beginning of the post says it best. Today it is easier for me to work with a combination of Microsoft and Google products.

None of this means that Apple products will not work for you. If you love Macs, your iPhone, and iPad, and are happy with the direction of Cupertino, you probably do not need to read any further.

However, if you feeling a little pressured in the Apple world, you might take some comfort from where I am headed with this next series of posts.

That Apple no longer makes products which fit my needs is something I have suspected for a long tme. However I will now go a step further and say that Apple's software products are mostly uncompelling and while some like iCloud are slightly better, they still are not very capable. I cannot comment on Apple's intergration with their mobile products but I am pretty ticked off with iCloud being tied to Yosemite for Macs. Google, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox, and almost anyone you can name does a better job with the cloud than Apple.

Beyond that, Apple's lack of consistency, openness and compatibility in its applications is beyond frustrating. I have had it with the confusion and extra steps required because much of our company's earlier work is in iWorks 09 and Apple latest versions are not completely compatible. While iMovie is still probably the most capable free product out there, I really hate that I seem have to relearn it the few times a year that I make a movie.

The last straw is Apple's attempt to force me to Yosemite on my Mac Mini because I upgraded on my iMac. It is an extra irritant that even today's Microsoft would not try.

That iPhoto is scheduled for the chopping block only makes me feel good that I abandoned it long ago. That Aperture is gone confirms my decision to stick with Lightroom in spite of buying a copy of Aperture a few years ago. Much of what I am seeing could have been predicted by Apple's treatment of the content that I entrusted to it years ago with its dot Mac service. I lost many websites and still have photos with screwed up names because Apple's web tools renamed them beyond recognition.

When you use products side by side every day, you notice things that others might miss. My I5 MacMini was always slower and more problematic than my I5 Lenovo tower. That Windows remembers the last place I have looked saves me time and I find renaming files simpler on Windows. My Windows computer also connects more quickly to my new NAS. I have gotten used to Windows 8 and I expect the next version of Windows will be better. I no longer have that hope for OSX where I find search does not work like it should. I have one HP printer which I have installed multiple times on the Mac. It usually works for a few days and stops. It has never stopped working on the Windows computers in the house. All those things are nits, but they figure in making a technology decision.

Evaluating the technology that you are using and how it meets your needs is probably not something most people take seriously, but it is important to me. I take lots of photos, build websites, write books, and spend a lot of time writing or creating information about fiber networks.

As I wrote before the holidays in No Apple Under The Tree This Year, my wait for Apple to address its core computing markets is over. I took an important step during the holidays. I ended up ordering a 16GB Lenovo with a 2TB drive, DVD recorder, keyboard, and mouse for $800.79 tax included. I had planned to a 32GB model but they were sold out so I ordered the 16GB model with a couple of expansion slots for RAM. Even with buying the extra memory, I will still have a 32GB Lenovo system for around for $975. Fortunately Lenovo unlike Apple still believes that products should be upgradeable.

My plan is to move much of my non-work related computing to the Lenovo. Migrating from my I5 Lenovo was pretty easy. I signed into my Microsoft account and it moved all my mail, contact and printer settings over without any problems. Signing into my Chrome and Firefox browsers also moved over much that I had used on the old computer. I did end up installing Start8 which I have on my other Windows 8 computers. I also copied over a hidden folder from Postbox and let Postbox re index my inbox overnight. I use Postbox as a second mail client and a very powerful mail search engine.

Step two was signing up for the photographer's version of Adobe's Creative Cloud. This means that I will slowly migrate from Pixelmator on the Mac back to Photoshop. I was already using Lightroom so this just gives me the latest version. I never completely quit using Photoshop. I just had a very old version.

My MacMini with its almost full 500GB drive was part of the reason I bought the new Lenovo. There was not room to do much of my photographic work and keep all of my company work going. However, I got lucky on that and my son solved the storage problem for me. He gave me a Synology NAS that he is no longer using and a new Gig Ethernet switch. After getting it set up, I did a test copy of over 3,600 photos. The copy took less than two minutes.

I quickly freed up 15GBs of space on the MacMini. That gives me enough room to run my VMWare Fusion version of Ubuntu Linux once again. I'll probably do that until I have time to convert my old I5 Windows box into a Linux machine ether by way of VMWare or with a direct installation.

Having almost 11TBs of raid protected storage has made some decisions a lot easier. Today, I took down my I5 iMac running Yosemite. With more breathing room on the MacMini, I really don't need it and it is one less version of Pages and Keynote to worry about when working with files. I did not find Yosemite compelling.

If we can eventually move all our business work to the latest versions of Pages and Keynote, I can delete iWork 09 from my hard drive. That might not happen for a while based on the way the new versions of Pages are handling old Pages documents.

At this point, I have Office 365 on my Windows computers and Office 2011 on my MacMini. We were using the iCloud version of Pages to do joint editing of simple documents like press releases. That stopped yesterday when I found out that one of the sharing links led to a blank document. Fortunately I had a downloaded version of the document as a backup. I have never had that happen with Google drive which I used for almost all my ReadWrite articles.

Pictures will be handled on my Windows computer with Picasa and Lightroom. Most of writing for the web is handled with the browser version of Draft so can be done on either platform. Books will be done in Word and can also be done on either platform.

Most of my websites are WordPress based so that is also browser based. A few are created by RapidWeaver and some hand-coded with TextWrangler but I am confident the Mac can still handle that.

In sense my computing life is a flip-flop of what I often saw when selling Macs for Apple. In those days it was not unusual to see someone using a Mac at home for personal use and a Windows computer at work. For most of my personal things except a couple of websites, I will be using Windows. When I do work for our company, I will be using a Mac.

However, the Mac that I'll be using runs Postbox for mail, Chrome and Firefox for browsers. I will still use RapidWeaver, TextWrangler, and Fetch. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote will only figure in my day job. I offered my wife a MacBook Air for Christmas, but she chose a Chromebook. So far she is very happy with it. However other than battery life she also has few complaints about her five year old HP I5 laptop running Windows 7. It has been very reliable.

I thought about Apple's obession with no ports and no DVD drives as I stuck my TurboTax into the external DVD drive I had to buy for my MacMini. Good thing TurboTax comes in both Mac and Windows versions.

December 12, 2014

It is the end of the year and time for my biennial technology refresh. My computers get heavy use since I work in the technology industry, write and take thousands of photos. I also build websites and have a few books to my credit including one on my career at Apple. During my last refresh in late 2012-early 2013, I bought a new Mac Mini and a new Lenovo Yoga laptop and a Lenovo I5 desktop.

My desktop is not a normal one but it has gotten to the point that I could use a new Mac. My I5 iMac is four years old and my I5 Mac Mini will be two years old in January. The hard drives are both are nearly full and the back of my Mac Mini is a cable nightmare. The Mac Mini chugs along much slower running Mavericks than it once did. Yosemite has not wowed me on my somewhat cursed iMac.

With earlier Apple products, I might have just popped the cases open and put in larger hard drives as I did many times in my still running dual G5 that I bought in December 2004, for $1795. I think it started life as a system with a single 80GB drive. It now has a pair of 1TB drives.

Popping the case open is not much of an option on either of my current Mac systems, but I work for a company that uses Macs which means Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are part of my daily work life. So I need a very functional system. Considering my job and the fact that I also spent almost two decades working at Apple, a new Mac would look like a shoe-in.

My history with Apple computers began with an Apple II+ and I got my first Mac when I joined Apple in 1984. When we sold our home in Roanoke, Virginia and made our final transition to the North Carolina coast, I cleaned out my home office equipment closet which had a wonderful collection of Macs that I had purchased over the years including my Mac IIcx/Quadra 700, Mac 8600, and Blue and White G3. I even had the motherboard and hard drive of the Mac II that I got as my company own-a-Mac when I moved from Apple Canada to Apple USA in 1987. The closet also had a couple of the six iMacs that I had purchased for my wife and daughters.

With that much history with Macs, it would seem that I would be a perfect candidate for a new Mac. Unfortunately Apple does not have a product that fits my needs. iMacs are hard to repair and the Mac Mini is just not expandable enough without resorting to expensive Thunderbolt upgrades. Even then the memory is limited to 16GB.

The dual G5 I got ten years ago is one of my favorite Macs of all time. It still runs whenever I need it. The $1,795 that I paid for it was a good investment and I would gladly pay something close to that for another updated version of an expandable Mac with a couple of easily swappable hard drives.

Unfortantely Apple has abandoned this segment of market. If I want a nice I7 system with 32GBs of RAM, a hybrid 2TB hard drive with a DVD drive and lots of USB ports, I have no choice but to look elsewhere. I can find something like that at Lenovo with a nice video card for $1,050 before taxes.

I would be happy to pay a 30% premium on that or close to $1,400 to Apple if I could get a product that really meets my needs.

What kind of desktops could I get from Apple for $1,000 but less than $1,500. It is a pretty unimpressive list.

I could get a 2.8Ghz I5 MacMini with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB fusion drive for $999. If I bump the Mac Mini to an I7 and 16GB of RAM, the price goes to $1,399. Unfortunately the Mac Mini now comes with soldered in RAM so even if it supported 32GB, there would be no way to get it there. You don't have to take my word for the latest Mac Mini not being what people might have wanted. Here is what Ars Technica has to say.

But as iFixit's teardown confirms, the system is no longer as versatile as it has been for the last few years. It's sad to see upgradeability thrown out the window even though the computer still has room for it on the inside.

The 21.5 inch iMac is limited to 8GB of memory and already costs $1,099. If I step up to the iMac with 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5 and !6GB of RAM, my cost goes up to $1,499. I am still stuck with a 1TB drive for that price, 16GB, and no DVD drive. I can get 32GB of RAM if I go to the iMac with Retina display. That would set me back $3,099 and I would still just have 1TB of storage, no DVD and an iMac that is even harder to service than the one I have. One of my least favorite things about the new Apple is how they force you to go up the line to get basic functionality. When I bought my I5 iMac, I had to buy the one with the largest screen at the time just to get an I5 processor.

I sold Apple products for years and understand well the mantra that specs are not everything. However, if you seriously use your computer for work like I do, the amount of RAM matters a lot. I already have a 16GB Mac Mini and I find it is not up to the job. So why would I replace it something just like it which by the way now costs more than the one I bought in 2013. The current low end Mac Mini is less expensive than what I paid for my Mac Mini but the processor is slower. A Mac Mini with the same processor that mine has costs $100 more than what I paid for mine and comes with RAM that cannot be removed. What a deal you have given us Apple.

So here I am wanting to buy a Mac that will go to 32B and have the potential for lots of extra storage. It appears that I have no choice but to look at the Mac Pro. The $2,999 Mac Pro comes with plenty of processing power but only 12GBs of RAM and only a 256GB SSD. It costs twice what I want to spend, has less RAM than I want and I still have to buy some Thunderbolt drives with enclosures to get to a couple of TBs and a DVD reader. A Mac Pro system would be well over $3,700. Would it last ten years? Who cares?

It does not matter whether Apple builds better sytems or worse ones. If they do not have anything that will meet your needs, you are out of luck. I hate to see Apple walk away from this segment, but I for one am tired of waiting for Apple to address its core computing markets. I will make do with the Macs that I have for work, but I plan to buy a new Windows machine that matches my needs. I will transfer more and more of my work to a Windows computer. Then I'll take my old Windows computer and make it a very nice Linux box. It was only about one and half years ago when I gave away my 2004 Dell Pentium running Ubuntu to a young student interested in Computer Science.

Apple built its computer business on the fact that you could customize its computers to your needs. Thunderbolt is way too expensive for most of us. I just need a serious computer with lots of RAM and the ability to have a couple of drives that I can change as technology moves forward. Apple is MIA in this segment. It might come back to bite them.

But I am tired of fighting it. Apple I get your message, I will go buy a new 32GB Windows machine with a 2TB drive and use the leftover money from what I had reserved for your coffers as a start towards a new camera.

It could be argued that Apple's business has been built on education and education is still a key market for the company. The iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone are the current hot products for Apple and in general are well received in the education market. However no product stays at the top in education forever and Google attacking Apple's education pond is a much bigger problem than Google coming out with an arguably over-priced Chromebook (The Pixel).

I come at this as someone who spent about half of my nearly two decades at Apple selling to the education market. Back in the last days of the Apple II, I made one of the largest single purchase order sales of Apple IIes. It put an Apple IIe in every fifth grade classroom in Nova Scotia. I went on to be higher education account executive of the year in 1992 and then led Apple's most successful higher education team over the five years that Apple treated higher education as a separate market.

I got ripped out of higher education during one of Apple's many reorganizations in the mid-nineties but education stayed close to my heart.

For years Apple believed in the power of computers in education to create consumers of Apple technology. We used to take great pride in higher education that we sent college students home every Thanksgiving with full instructions as to what their families needed in the way of computer technology.

In the dark days of Apple, when it was hard to find a decent reseller of Apple products anywhere, you could discover many wonderful places to buy Macs on campuses well before Apple Stores ever showed up at the mall. Apple at the time was a real partner with campus resellers.

When I was director of federal sales at Apple, I can remember being flown to California twice to take part in education briefings. Schools in the period just after 2000, were worried that using Macs to teach their students would make them ill-prepared for a career in the business world. My job was to tell them about all the successes that the federal team was having at NASA, NIH, and the many federal labs. The not so subtle message was "Do you want your child just to learn how to use Microsoft Word or how to think like a scientist?" It was a powerful message and well received by many schools.

Apple is changed company since those days but Apple is still about convincing you that you need the next glitzy device. At Apple I heard Steve Jobs say many times that we were not an enterprise company but rather one that sold products that are sometimes very useful in the enterprise. He often followed that message with a comment about the heart of Apple being education.

So what happened? It would be easy to say that Apple became enthralled with its own gadets and maybe that is part of it. However, I think it was a much more subtle change and I have to put the blame on Steve Jobs and not Tim Cook. Tim Cook might be guiding the good ship Apple, but Steve Jobs put it on this course.

One of the biggest things that changed after Steve came back was how Apple interacted with its higher education and large business customers. There were changes with the K-12 customers but perhaps not so dramatic. If you were at Apple in the early nineties, you would probably agree that Apple and many of the thought leaders in higher education agreed that computing had the power to transform education. At one time Apple invested in many higher education projects. Apple also listened to higher education customers and worked with them to deliver exactly what their students needed for a college computing environment. There was a tremendous synergy between Apple and its higher education customers. We gave them special pricing, told them what we were going to do before we did it, and often protected them from their own mistakes.

Much of this changed when Steve came back. The first to go were customer meetings with publishing professionals. Steve did not enjoy customer meetings when he was not on a stage. While the higher education meetings continued, it was clear that Apple was not listening seriously.

The Cupertino briefings kept going for business, higher education, and K-12 customers but the amount of useful planning information that came out of the meetings declined. It was not unusual for Apple to pay the way of some K-12 executives to come to a Cupertino briefing but the true education partnerships were gone. However, the briefings also brought out another change that was close to Steve's heart. Apple sales people were excluded from customer briefings when non-disclosure information was discussed. Apple would often tell customers something that they were unwilling to tell their own sales people.

That might seem fine on the surface since no one likes sales people, but when you are company such as Apple which in essence walls itself off from its own customers except for the tiny scripted interactions that take place in an executive briefing, you need consistent, reliable feedback from your sales people as to the directions that customers are headed or the issues they need solved.

By not trusting its own sales people and giving up on customer advisory boards that often fueled Apple's own imagination, I believe Apple has become disconnected from some core elements of its customer base. Having some arrogant, perhaps even toxic sales vps has not helped Apple with its education customers. One of the worst ones is gone, but I suspect people are still trying to repair the damage that he did.

The second thing that I believe hurt Apple is the inability of the company to get web services right. While today's iCloud is better than it was, it is way too confusing compared to Google's Drive and Docs which just keep getting better and better.

The web has been an afterthought for Apple for as long as I can remember. Your web data has often been tied to a particular device just like your iPod. I remember a strong push from some of us in Apple's enterprise groups for a home directory that would work from USB thumb drives. I actually saw prototypes working but Steve shot it down because he thought people would screw it up.

Google has always abstracted the data from the hardware, Apple has always tied the data to a device in the hopes that you will buy a new one.

You can use Google Docs from just about any device including Macs of all stripes. Just try using Apple's cloud services from an Android device. Of course I have found Apple's cloud apps are often hobbled like the inability to do notes in Pages or presenter notes in Keynote. Actually you cannot even upload files from an old Mac to Apple's own Cloud drive. You have to use DropBox. How many schools have you visited where old Macs and in fact any old computers that they can find are part of their educational computing program?

While Apple was diddling around with the complexities of NetBoot, difficult to manage one to one laptop deployments and trying to convince educational customers that first the iPod, then the iPad was the greatest thing for education since chalk, Google went out and solved some real customer problems and gave educational users a way to use computers without a lot of hassle. They also gave them a keyboard, a way to collaborate, and they made it very inexpensive.

Apple makes very nice devices. On Black Friday, my wife and I were in Best Buy. I wanted her to have a look at a MacBook. Since I work for a company that uses Macs, I thought it would be nice for her to get a Mac so I would have one in case I needed to edit some Pages documents when we are traveling (and yes I have used Pages on the web). She spent some time with a MacBook Air and then went over and tried a Chromebook. Her question to me, "Why would anyone with basic browsing and email needs spend more than three times the money on a MacBook?" I had no answer.

For education customers the question turns out to be, "Why would I spent double the money on an iPad that doesn't meet the needs of my students as well as a Chromebook which is much easier to manage?"

It is a good question and most educational institutions have figured out the answer as we can see from the education sales figures.

November 13, 2014

Reading a sampling of this week's articles about Apple heading into the enterprise brings to mind Yogi Berra's famous comment "It's like déjà vu all over again." As one Apple employee told me, we never stopped going after the enterprise.

There is a grain of truth in that as I will explain later, but if you read a few of this week's Apple enterprise articles, you will find that the newest Apple push is based on partnerships with other vendors and developers. When I see articles touting partnerships like the one with IBM, I have a hard time thinking beyond what a longtime Apple employee told me a few weeks ago. "You cannot say Apple and partnership in the same sentence."

The gospel according to Steve Jobs says that Apple is a consumer company which makes great products, some of which work very well in the enterprise.

My last few years at Apple I led what might have been Apple's most successful enterprise team. It was something of a skunk works project, but we did exceptionally well in one of the toughest enterprise markets in the world, the United States federal government. We had some high level support including Tim Cook, Bud Tribble, and Fred Anderson.

We were able to get operating system level implementations that made Apple products attractive to a number of agencies and especially to scientists who were tired of dealing with what at the time was a never-ending assault of viruses and malware. We got as far as getting OS X approved as part of the federal government's enterprise architecture. Apple did an OS level implementation of smart cards. Smart cards are requirement if you are going to do business with the federal government. A couple years after I left, they even published a manual about how to implement smart card services on your Mac.

Apple in 2000-2004 period championed CDSA, or Common Data Security Architecture, as the middle-ware building block for smart cards. The theory being it would be easier for everyone if security devices and providers across difference architectures wrote to the same middle-ware. I have not followed this closely but I know that you can still use smart cards with a Mac. However, Apple has switched how they do it all as of Yosemite and there are some questions as to Apple's direction with their security implementation.

With that as a background, here are my thoughts on Apple and the "new" enterprise push.

First Apple has done many enterprise pushes and perhaps all have shown some degree of success but the ill-fated attempt just after 2000 to get into the enterprise with iMac kiosks. The only thing thing that push accomplished was to get a lot of enterprise sales people fired.

Since the early nineties, all of Apple's enterprise sales pushes have had a few common characteristics.

Lots of strategy.

Few actual Apple feet on the street.

Apple has continued to go its own way.

I still remember the Apple-DEC alliance announced in 1988. Most of us selling to the enterprise hopped on a train and went to DEC Word in New York City. DEC was to provide the integration support and people to get Macs into the enterprise. I cannot remember any sales bump from the DEC alliance. Perhaps the third time alliance with IBM will be the charm.

In talking to Apple folks, the theory is that Apple is just building the hooks into OS software mostly iOS and that the enterprise folks are going to run with this on their own with help from IBM and a sales bump to Apple.

It is obvious that iPhones are doing well in American corporations. A new iPhone, much like a fancy Mac was in my days of selling at Apple, is a pretty nice corporate perk. iPhones are tied down more than the Android world so there is some appeal to the corporate IT folks.

However, there are some substantial cultural barriers at Apple.

As my example with smart cards illustrates, Apple often changes course for what seems to Apple like very good reasons. However, those changes are sometimes not communicated well and often the benefit is more in Apple's mind than to the customer who sometimes just wants things to work without having to jump through some new hoops.

Apple really does not know how to listen to customer needs. It used to be a big part of the company's culture before Steve came back. It disappeared then. If you saw the procedure Apple uses to determine what features make it into an OS release, you would have a hard time not laughing. I hope but doubt it has changed much.

Though the Yosemite Beta program is certainly a step in the right direction, I doubt we will see pre-release versions of iPhones being sent out to enterprises to make sure that new software and/or hardware does not break their software. Apple is built on surprise and secrets which are not favorites in the enterprise world.

Enterprises really like companies that keep working on something until they get it fixed. Apple would rather invent something new than fix something old. That is truly part of the company's DNA.

Enterprise sales are often built on long time relationships between executives and Apple does not do this well. One of our biggest challenges in selling to the federal government was that no Apple executive would say in public that the enterprise was important to Apple and that Apple would stick with its enterprise products. Beyond that Apple executives do not like to travel far beyond the safety of their offices in Cupertino. You have to make the pilgrimage to Cupertino. Enterprises want you to come to them. Unfortunately not enough comes out of Apple executive briefings to compensate for this Cupertino-centric approach.

The whole Xserve with the RAID product was supposed to a major push into the enterprise. They were great products but Apple had done little preparation for the selling and support of the products. They shipped the products, the field sort of figured out how to sell them and the diehard Apple customers helped us through the many product challenges. Apple actually did a training for the sales people after the Xserves had been selling and the people doing much of the training were the people in the field who had figured out the product's limitations. Apple was never willing to commit enough system engineer resourses to adequately support the products. Apple also made a major server architecture change to Intel. Changing processors pulled the rug out from under one of the largest Xserve customers who was using the Xserve product mostly because of the small heat footprint of its PowerPC processors. One might want to ask the VAR who got stuck with lots of outdated PowerPC Xserves about the reliability of Apple as a partner.

As to Apple listening to customers, I can still remember giving Tim Cook's Quicktime movies of enterprise customers talking about the difficulties they were having getting Macs to be good citizens on their Active Directory networks. After those made their way through the organization, I can remember Avie Tevanian flat out telling us that the customers did not know what they were talking about when they said Macs were not good Active Directory clients. In his mind there was no problem.

The solution to that problem was that I took one of my field system engineers and had him spend months writing an Active Directory plugin that got rolled into OS X. The employee is still writing OS software for Apple.

I was recently complaining to an Apple employee about all the incompatibilities between different versions of Pages. He assured me there were no problems. Yet I told him we live with problems almost on a daily basis because so much of our work over the years is in Pages 09 and there are always litle problems if we open the sixty page documents in newer versions. He said that Apple certainly did not expect enterprise employees to move to Pages but it was fine for small businesses. As someone in a small business, I might question that assessment.

Unfortunately the problem is not really Pages. It is Apple's attitude that it is okay to release a product that is not backwards compatible and then not even work at fixing it. If iPhoto can die for a "better" product, what changes might Apple spring on the enterprise just because it is going to make something better for Apple.

I am not holding up Microsoft as the perfect enterprise company, but the kind of we-are-going-to-fix-it attitude that took VISTA and made it into Windows 7 helps enterprise customers stay the course.

It is entirely possible that Apple's DNA has completely changed and this enterprise push will be the charm, but pardon me if I remain a skeptic for a couple of years.

As with most things Apple, time will tell better than any of us making guesses, but at least I have history on my side. That is my take on Apple and the enterprise from our spot which is almost as far as way from Cupertino as one can get and still be in the United States.

Our November Transformation at the coast is a much better prospect than hopping on an airplane and heading to one of the Apple Sales Conferences that are happening this time of year.

However, I will look forward to hearing how this new enterprise push is positioned internally. It should be entertaining.

October 13, 2014

I keep hoping that with all the success Apple is seeing that the company might ease up on the many little things that it does to force Mac users to walk the straight and narrow line of Apple issued software. It does not appear to happening.

I spent a couple of decades selling Apple hardware. At Apple we often criticized Microsoft for selling software that locked users into Microsoft hardware and software. Once Microsoft got mail servers supporting Outlook in an organization, it was very hard for Macs to be good clients on a network.

Plenty of forward looking enterprise CIOs wanted Macs to work well on their Microsoft networks. I attended some meetings with impressive rosters of enterprise customers and I watched them push Microsoft hard to provide better support for Macs.

Another piece of the strong sales message that we crafted when getting Macs into serious computing environments was that with a Mac you could easily craft your own productivity suite and everything would still work seamlessly because you were on a Mac.

I think the Mac has entered a very dark period in its history. Apple is so focused on selling iOS devices and making sure you use Apple's own software that it is tying things together in ways that would likely land Microsoft in court.

Some of you might have read my post, The Chancy Software of Apple. One of the reasons I wrote the post was my extreme frustration with Apple's Mail app. I moved to Postbox and I am very happy with its reliability and much superior search. I was already using it on my Windows desktop so the transition was relatively easy. However, it did not take long to figure out that I had strayed from the Apple way.

The first time I went to share a PDF with preview, I figured out that there was no longer an option to email it directly from Preview since my default email program is now Postbox. I had to save the PDF and manually attach the file.

I rarely use iPhoto but I decided to see what would happen if tried to email a photo. I went to general settings to see if Postbox would show up as a possibility in sending photos from iPhoto. There were three choices, "iPhoto, Mail, and Microsoft Outlook," but no option to use my default email client. Of course this means if I decide to email a photo from iPhoto, it launches Mail.app instead of creating an email in Postbox.

I can also no longer click the share button in Pages to send an email either. All I have to do be able to share by email is change my default email client back to Mail.app and restart Pages and magically I can once again share by email directly from Pages.

If we compare this to the Microsoft world, things are very different. If I want to share a file or a PDF from Word on Windows, Word launches my default Windows email client, Postbox, without any problems. I do not even have Outlook installed on my Windows computer. Unfortunately with Word on the Mac, Microsoft seems to be hewing the Apple line. I can no longer email a file directly from Word on the Mac.

I use Windows Photo Gallery even less that I do iPhoto but it also works fine sending a picture with Postbox. I do use both Picasa and Lightroom on Windows. Picasa gives me the option of sending with my default email or directly with Gmail. Lightroom uses my default email client.

The most telling example is Picasa running on the Mac, it offers me the option of using my default email client on the Mac, Postbox, or directly with Gmail. That would seem to indicate to me that it is technically possible. Unfortunately it must not be that easy because another cross platform program, SnagIt, tells me that Postbox is an unsupported mail client. That is true on the Mac but somehow Techsmith, the makers of Snagit, have figured out how to support Postbox from their Windows version.

As much as Apple disliked Microsoft, it now seems to be favoring Microsoft products. Word is as close as you can get to RTF from Apple's pages. Then there is the whole iCloud fiasco. I recently read that you could actually start putting other documents besides Apple ones up in Apple's iCloud so I tried to have a look from my Windows desktop since apparently it is already implemented on Windows 8 but not on the Mac until Yosemite ships. Turns out that iCloud requires an iOS 8 device in addition to your Windows computer.

I do not have to own a Windows phone to access One Drive nor to do I have to own an Android phone to use Google drive. Apple has made a wrong turn. If you build great software you do not have to force people to use your software, they will use it by choice. People once chose to use iPhoto.

I know Apple likes us to do things their way, but if the price is using sub-standard software like Mail and iPhoto, I think I will pass. I will spend more time on Windows and head out to enjoy one of our great fall evenings on the beach instead of trying to force things to work on my Macs.

October 03, 2014

Many people love Apple computer hardware. I think people who love Apple written software are a little harder to find. Sure there are people out there who still think OS X is Apple's gift to the world, but you will struggle to find someone singing the praises of Mail, Pages, Keynote, iPhoto or any of Apple's shrinking suite of computer software. I can say up front that I have said some nice things about Pages 5 but it is not a piece of software that I choose to use.

Part of the problem is that Apple introduces software and kills it off. The list goes back many years and includes software from Apple's application company Claris. Claris emailer was a good program as was Claris Works. Aperture was well thought of by some users and I was a fan of iDVD. All those programs are gone.

Then there is the iWork series that languished until recently when Apple brought out Pages 5 which creates all sorts of formatting problems when moving back and forth between it and Pages 09. People would not have to move back and forth if Apple had maintained feature parity with the old version.

Word might be bloated and not much fun to use, but it does a much better job moving between platforms and versions. Apple just does not seem to care.

I can perhaps buy the argument that Claris Emailer did not make sense for Claris when Apple decided to give away the Mail.app program. However, if that is the case then why isn't Apple's mail program a better program?

Perhaps you think it is, but I can assure you that it is not a program that you want to bet your company on these days.

While I admit to being an email program's worst nightmare with over a dozen email accounts, I long ago gave up pushing Mail.app. I only asked it to take care of five email accounts. One is a legacy Mobile Me account and aother is an iCloud account. The other three accounts were IMAP based accounts that I use in business.

I have been struggling for three or four months to trouble shoot a Mail.app problem on my Mac Mini. Before I detail the problem, it might help to understand my desktop. I have multiple computers at my fingertips including an iMac that is not pictured. In my office I run two Mac computers with OS 10.9.5, one desktop with Windows 8.1, and a laptop with Windows 7. I also have another laptop with Windows 8.1 that sits on our kitchen table downstairs. My MacMini also runs VMware Fusion and Xubuntu Linux.

In addition to all the computers (and you can read more at this article), I also once was a vice president at an email services company and spent plenty of time reviewing training materials telling people how to configure our email services on a variety of email clients. I also did some of our Linux and Mac compatibility testing.

There are not many email clients that I have not used over the years including Eudora and even Outlook on earlier versions of Windows. Having worked for years at Apple and after spending time at an email company, I believe email should be bullet proof. Even after I left our email company, I would sometimes call the company and ask them if they were having server problems when I noticed an email taking too long to be delivered. Each time I called, it was confirmed that they were experiencing some server problems.

So here is the email problem that has finally made me call it quits with Mail.app. One of my business email accounts will randomly will stop receiving emails and/or refuse to send emails. I have done everything to verify the settings are correct including deleting the account and starting over. Nothing helps except pivoting to another computer to send or receive the email. Mostly I just launch VMware Fusion and Thunderbird and send the copied and pasted text from Thunderbird running on Linux. It has never failed me.

I have also turned to my iMac and sent the email using the Mail.app running on it. It never has a problem sending the email. Of course I am also able to send using Windows Mail 8.1 which I quite like. Today I finally broke down an installed Postbox on my MacMini with the troublesome Mail.app. There was still an email from yesterday that my boss had sent and that Mail.app had refused to receive. Within minutes of entering the same settings into Postbox, I had the email from yesterday. It is also worth mentioning that my original Kindle Fire, my Nexus tablet, and Android smartphone all have no problem with the same email account.

I have done enough testing to conclude that Mail.app on this particular MacMini has a problem. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. Perhaps I could reintall Mail.app and fix the problem but it was easier to install Postbox because I get the added benefit of a mail search that actually works.

I was reminded of how well the Apple Mail program worked at one time when I booted up my trusted Dual G5 running OS 10.3.9. I personally like the older version of OS X, iPhoto, and Mail. Mail search actually found what I was looking for quickly. iPhoto let me use the escape key to move back from a picture to the library and the old version of OS X felt very comfortable. I was relieved to find the operating system actually remembered the last place I looked for files. It was also interesting that there was no Apple way to move some exported JPEG files from my old iPhoto to the cloud. I ended up using Dropbox which worked perfectly. Apple has proved time and again that it does not care even one tiny bit about my ten year old Mac.

Now I am not going to give up on Macs because of a flaky mail program, but Apple seems to be waging a war of attrition on serious computer users. iPhoto certainly is not the revolutionary program which I loved when it was first introduced. Even the iPhoned-version of it seems is falling out of favor. I actually quit depending on iPhoto over three years ago, I pull the plug on Apple's iPhoto at v 9.1.5. I moved to Picasa and Lightroom.

While I can make it run, I truly miss an up to date version of iDVD. Then there is iMovie. I just prepare to relearn the program every time that I use it. Apple's somewhat undeserved reputation of user interface consistency falls completely flat with iMovie. It seems to never be the same program. The formatting errors we find moving back and forth between versions of Pages are a huge hit to productivity. It takes a lot of time to correct them and we cannot find any font based issue that would cause the problems. Adobe got a lot of our company's money to make certain that was not the problem. In the end it is easier to switch over to Word to do a mail merge than fight with different versions of Pages.

Seriously if I am a Mac user in business, I seem to be stuck with Microsoft Office and what seems to be the declining interest of Apple in providing alternative software and services. I did not become a Mac user and go to work at Apple just so that I could have nice hardware to run Microsoft applications. I could write a whole post on how disappointed I am in iCloud. So many companies even Microsoft get the cloud close to right and Apple cannot even get into the ballpark.

I recently asked an Apple employee if Apple used any of their own software, the reply I got was that a handful of Pages documents have been sent out but never a Numbers document. I suspect Apple still uses Keynote, but that is not enough to keep a business user on the platform even if it were truly that much better than PowerPoint.

Perhaps Apple's software would get better if company policy dictated only Pages and Numbers documents sent from Mail.app.

I work for a company that uses Macs so I will continue to hope for innovative solutions like Postbox that make staying on the Apple platform a lot easier.

I will admit to being a long time critic of Apple and its cloud efforts. Part of the reason is that I worked at Apple for so many years and was in the cloud with them from the start. Because of Apple's many tries at getting the web right, I am certain I still have broken website links and lost photo albums not to mention abandoned webpages that I trusted Apple to host.

Still I am going to point the finger at Apple because Apple has never understood the web and the latest implementation of iCloud shows that basic lack of understanding of the web and how most people use it.

Adding photos to your Picasa web albums, Google drive, Dropbox or your Microsoft Skydrive is much easier than fooling around with your photostream.

I could have also said deleting them is much less of a challenge.

So here is the real problem and it is Apple's problem and not something that users can fix on their own. You cannot administer and manage the photos on your iCloud account from a web interface. In fact you cannot even use a web interface to see what photos are in your iCloud photostream. You have to find the Apple device that put the photos there and delete them from that device.

Just think how backwards that is from the way that the web and other cloud services work? All services that I have used allow me to log into my account and manage my content from the web. If I see a photo album that I do not want to be on the web, I can delete it. I hate to break the news to Tim Cook and his developers but the web usually outlasts Apple devices. I had the problem when I was at Apple. One of my Apple devices would disappear and it was impossible to manage what the device had put on the web.

It is the fatal flaw in Apple's web strategy. Apple is a device centric company and putting a web interface on something means that you could manage your iPhone photos with a Windows or even a Linux computer.

A basic computing rule that web centric companies have figured is that your data should be device independent. I should be able to manage my web photos or content with any device not just one manufactured by Apple.

This becomes very important when devices die or when you decide to switch to another platform. Of course Apple does not want you to switch so they put you in a walled garden where it is inconvenient to switch.

I am not exactly sure how the hackers got the photos that were on iCloud, but I suspect the photos just synced to whatever Apple device they used to get into the account.

By protecting its users from actually seeing files in iCloud, Apple has actually made it much easier for the wrong files to end up and remain on the web. Now I am not defending anyone who is crazy enough to take nude pictures of themselves but in making it so easy for photos to get on the web with an Apple device and so hard to tell what is actually there, Apple bears some responsibility and can help fix the problem.

Apple owes users a web interface and a way to see what photos it is storing on iCloud. I think Apple's brilliant software team could figure that out if Tim Cook told them to do it. Isn't it about time that Apple got the web right. While they are doing it maybe that could fix that document black hole that they have promised to fix.

Some place between the two views of Apple lies the truth, but as a heavy user of technology and one who sees problems that could use the magic Apple touch, I remain unconvinced that the changes at Apple are anything more than cosmetic or that we will see products that might help us have an easier time doing our jobs in a digital world that Apple helped create and even complicate.

Still I am glad to see Apple finally embracing a blog even if it is just for developers who have had a special relationship with Apple for many years. In fact developers have often had a better relationship with Apple than many Apple employees who oft times are in the dark about what the Cupertino mothership has planned. Maybe having a blog will help Apple better understand the needs of web content creators.

Perhaps as a heavy technology user who creates content I am in a small minority, but I remember well the days when Apple brought us WYSIWYG technology that worked very well in the black and white print world of the mid-eighties. Apple kept pace for many years delivering color printing capabilities that set the standard for the rest of the industry.

As content also found a home on the web, Apple got lost. It never came up with a web tool that was worth using. In fact Apple ignored the whole blogging world and missed one of the essences of the web, that your content has to be editable on all sorts of devices even one that you might not manufacture. I always thought Apple was clueless about blogging because no one at Apple ever did any blogging. Certainly iWeb was never a serious competitor.

I started my first blog using TypePad not long after leaving Apple in 2004. That was ten years ago and Apple has finally decided to do a blog but only to try to win developers over to yet another new language. I would be much more impressed if some Apple executives were blogging and trying to learn what Apple needs to do next.

While other companies have been figuring out the web and using it to better understand their customers, Apple has been busy becoming a consumer company with just as much secrecy as the old Apple. Those of us who still use products like RapidWeaver for the Mac to create content are obviously in the minority but I do not think Apple should give up on people like me. While Apple let the whole web world slide by and has been inconsistent with its tools, there is still a vast opportunity out there for an innovative company.

Unfortunately Apple's recent products have not helped. While I like the new Pages 5 tool, you cannot even export HTML from it. With the Beats acquisition, I see Apple moving farther from its roots as company that provides great productivity to users who have to work with digital assets.

We are in a strange world right now where often content is on the web, in ebooks, and in print. It is a very complex process to take content and have it work in a variety of environments. There are tools out there that promise to do this, but they are either expensive or complex to use.

The real genius of Apple that kept the company alive was reducing the complex to simple. When the Mac was introduced, we could print what we saw on the screen. Screen resolution and printer resolution did not increase in lock step but it was close enough and the tools were good enough that we could do a pretty good job producing print jobs and eventually that included color ones.

I just finished publishing the third version of my book, A Week at The Beach - The Emerald Ise Travel Guide. I ended up doing the final Kindle version on Word for Windows and the final print version on Word for the Macintosh. It would have been nice to pull everything together with an Apple product, but Apple obviously wants you to use iAuthor and publish only on their store. Word on the Mac does not do well what the Kindle world requires which is filtered HTML.

While I can understand Apple wanting to tie content to its devices, it would seem logical to me if Apple's devices are the best products for writing Kindle books that Apple will sell more products and probably get more books for the Apple platform. Yet the most recent version of iBooks Author will only export as an iBook, PDF, or Text.

I am not going to pretend this is an easy area to tackle but neither were products like iMovie and iPhoto. There is a huge opportunity for Apple to create an amazing writing tool that gives content creators more flexibility than iBooks Author and also lets them create books for Apple's store, the Kindle store, and for the print world. Apple already has a leg up on being able to use video in iBooks Author but the company also has a serious tilt towards a closed eco-system instead of an open one.

There are also sort of directions Apple could take, but I would love to see something like John Gruber's Markdown language used so that the same content could have different formatting applied to it. I already use a cloud-based product called Draft. Draft has introduced Kindle support so I am anxious to try it.

Right now those of us trying to publish in multiple environments would probably jump on an Apple solution. One that would let me publish to a blog, a web page, a PDF(x3 of course), or a real paper book would be most welcome. Third parties can build those things, but those of use who used the old Apple LaserWriters remember how well things worked when Apple worked closely with Adobe to make sure software, hardware, and printers all worked together seamlessly. I would love to no longer worry about hidden HTML in a Word document.

Amazon with its Kindle reader product for virtually every platform has done a great job making sure a work published on the Kindle store is widely available even on Apple hardware. They also have CreateSpace as an in house paper print publishing firm. They have their delivery mechanism down pat. However, other than emulators to check your work, they provide little help in the actual creation.

If Tim Cook's Apple is truly a more cooperative Apple, it would be great to see Apple become the publishing platform of choice once again even it means having to talk nicely to Amazon.

When I am not trying to coerce last generation tools to produce next generation books and content, you can often find me here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast enjoying one of the most beautiful places on earth.